Pontas hot title at the volcanoed London Book Fair is/was The Case of Vincent Franke by Christoffer Carlsson. Martina Torradeswas unable to fly to London from Barcelona and her three full-days schedule had to be cancelled…. But the whole Pontas team is now in touch with all the appointments we had and the show must go on!!

In The Case of Vincent Franke (published in March 2010 in Sweden by Piratförlaget) we meet the Stockholm underground and the dark sides of the streets and of its people. This is a strong debut by the 23 year old Swedish author Christoffer Carlsson. But even if it looks like a crime novel it is a novel about the darkest sides of life and told from the perspective of a person who let morphine cut out every feeling in his life. From the first page the reader is tossed into a twilight zone, the frontiers between death and drugs, prostitutes and pimps, criminals and rotten cops. The main characters are the beaten people.

The Case of Vincent Franke is a definite noir novel, filled with popular cultural references, like Blade Runner and Watchmen. It’s a sad story about humans; it’s a fast and exciting novel about the drug addict Vincent Franke and his connections to the dark sides of the streets and people of Stockholm. When he meets Maria, another lost and outcaste person like himself, suddenly his world gets even more complicated and they have to run from everything that threatens their life and relationship…

Said about the novel:

“An exciting novel in the genre close to film noir. And it is very black. But is also an incredibly human story and it’s also a stunningly good debut… And yet so the language is very driven and mature that I come to think of the young debutants from another era, like Klas Östergren and Lars Andersson.” — Mats Palmquist, Borås Tidning

“Already shows that he’s not going to accept to be one in the grey line of Swedish crime authors, where you have one on a dozen (…). Christoffer Carlsson is a name to remember.” — Nils Schwartz, Expressen

About the author:

Christoffer Carlsson (Halmstad, Sweden, 1986) is living in Stockholm. He is studying a Doctors degree in Criminology.